


The Old Flaywoman

by Eschat0n



Category: Brigador (Video Game)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:15:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25868047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eschat0n/pseuds/Eschat0n
Summary: The world of Volta is abandoned by stellar corporations after the planet's mineral resources became residual. In this world, the workers who have been left behind turned quickly to tribalism and desperate violence, forced to live in indigence without any means of sustaining themselves on this dying planet except for the great nutrient pipelines which still remained, pumping life-giving resources from deep within the planet's crust. Intermittent trading expeditions from the Corporations barter for the scant resources Voltans can scrape together in return for paltry items like paper plates and disposable cutlery.This is the world of Solojazz and her tribe, the Jazz. Like most Voltans who gaze at the stars and let the madness of knowledge about the fabulous wealth in that far beyond haunt them, she wants off the planet.
Kudos: 3





	The Old Flaywoman

Solojazz was her secret name, after the fine-split chalice which adorned her face and marked her owned – a pure name of brand given only to the valuable. But the Jazz had no use for women like Solojazz after childbearing years were done, and so she did not toil for them anymore except for this: to sit huddled on the packed floor of a flaying hut, leathery skin shrugging off the burn of its alkalines while she groped with a wire hangar in the skull of a slain Redcup warrior for the 30mm ball bearing that had laid him low, launched from the quadbow of one of her former mates’ children. A proud thought, that. In her blood the pipeline of her foremothers would be preserved.

There was no need for light in the flaying hut, for there was a rare western sky of stars poking through its rafters. Though all Voltans liked to be underground for a clear western sky, Solojazz did not mind the madness which those glittering points and flashing satellites brought her people.

“The sickness of a thinky meat cannot not escape the size of the skull,” she muttered to the dead man – and at that moment she felt the squelch of brain and dura mater give way; felt the grit of metal on metal as her hangar found the ball, buried deep in the center of the meat. She dug it out and washed her hands in the dust bowl to ritually cleanse herself of the man’s other spirit. The ball, too, she cleaned the same way, and set beside the small pile of others she had already dug from the fallen – friend and foe alike – ready for another use. The body – last of the work – she dragged to the heap outside the hut, where flaymen waited to take them for use in the fields.

This was the way of the Voltan Cycle: the nutrient pipelines were finite, built by the Company in the Early Times. Only thirty-two now remained within the realms her foremothers knew. From these were piped the deep gifts of the planet; the fertilizers and the steam – always a steady trickle – and though many aqueducts were built by the foremothers to bring this supply as far as it could be brought, each only siphoned off a portion of the mother stream. Therefore, from the blood and flesh of the dead was added back the Debt to the fields planted, to water and feed them.

These unfortunates would go hence, brought by the flaymen to lie in the field and return the Debt. That her people had retained control of the field after the battle meant the Debt of the Redcups would be paid to the pipeline of the Jazz, and bring increase to her tribe, to better pay the Tithe, next of which was due tomorrow. The tug had already landed at the settlement, and the warriors of the Company had made their ring around it. Already the traditional raid had been made, and that Debt repaid. Soon the greatest mothers who could still bear would greet the Company’s people on the pad and negotiate the Tithe while trying to hide whatever Debts they had been able to add - dead to their fields living to their mines.

A momentous time, and one which Solojazz knew she had better make herself scarce for, lest her old blood and bones be sought to balance Debt and Tithe. She planned to walk the Scapegoat ridge looking for blooms on those high peaks – the folly of sweat lost in that endeavor only further proof of her madness for the bearers of her tribe. No matter. It also paid honor to the _compete_ which all living things heeded, if aligned within themselves. She would struggle on as long as she could before she contributed to the Debt. It was right and good.

  
These thoughts bade Solojazz look up before she shambled off to find a quiet, dark quarter of the basecamp road where she might hide for sleep before beginning out. Directing her gaze toward the Bright horizon, over the basecamp walls toward the settlement where the tug would be sitting, she was surprised to see nothing but the approach of a hooded silhouette, face dark in the halo of that eternally-shining eastern sky.

“Solojazz,” the silhouette said, using her true name in a whisper she recognized – her father. She grabbed the hilt of her plastshiv at her hip, ready to defend the name in case it was not family who spoke it. The old woman said nothing in return; the father was the most loose of family associations; returning such a greeting would give it a credence she did not wish to grant. Seeing that she hesitated in the attack, the silhouette approached more boldly, throwing off its hood to reveal the shaven wrinkles of her father, weak and ludicrous in his dotage. She could not resist curling her lips slightly at the sight of such latent inefficiency.

“Solojazz,” her father whispered again, and he came directly up to her and took her knife hand, placing the deadly white of the blade against his chest in greeting. She relaxed. Perhaps he came to cease _compete_ out of weakness; give himself over to flaying and payment of Debt through her, to further his line one last time. It would be a good omen for her – but this was not why he was here.

“One of the outcasts in the western lowlands gives birth this night,” he whispered, eyes large. Solojazz did not emote at this.

“One of the sawgrass stalks in the field was cut today,” she replied.

“No, Solo. _Listen_. A starman waits for it. He has _claimed_ it as his Revelator.”

Solojazz pulled her hand back from her father’s chest.

“I cannot associate with anyone of the Company. I still follow my _compete_. I suggest you do the same, my father.”

The old man frowned – the weakness of those without a mask was incredible, overpowering, even. It was unseemly. Solojazz wished to cut to the heart of the matter and be done with it, to flay it like a man.

“The shamans say - unless the baby is born to an obsessive or a shaman, it cannot be a Revelator.”

“It is both, Solojazz,” the old man said, excited. “The outcast Styro and her mate, the No Legs. They have a baby coming to them, for the starman. I spoke with them coming back from the lowlands after my last sleep, heavy with blooms in my basket, and they said: ‘send for a midwife who will arouse no suspicion. The Canned Woman cannot know or it will be in the Tithe.’”

“They would bond in their _compete_ with me for some payment hidden to the Tithe?”

“Yes, and you must not ask how much because I know you and I have nothing and mother is dead. We must go to the western wall at once; I have a ride so that we will make the time.”

  
They went to the western wall and there he showed her a scooter and its dead outrider, poisoned with a dirtbane dart still in his neck, hidden under its carriage. Clearly, her father had bet his whole life on this. That much was very honorable _compete_ , she had to admit. Still, it frightened her; she was not yet so certain she wanted to end her life so quickly as this, for surely the matriarchs would make them pay the Debt for killing a valuable outrider and burning the fuel of his scooter. She glanced around nervously to see anyone else could view this scene, but it was shadowed under the wall of the garrison building and the patrols were still being remanned after the battle; they were not up to full strength. No one saw them here.

Suddenly it was clear to Solojazz – the star madness was in her father, gifting him with this fate. Too much luck accompanied him. She touched the old man’s cloak as he sat the scooter (he had been an outrider himself in past time).

“What do you do?”

Solojazz sat the scooter behind him. “I want your mad luck, father. You are guided by the stars.”

The spent man said nothing, but the scooter’s engine boosted, spitting fumes, and launched them up into the air. Before a single soul could see, it propelled them over the wall and out, toward the lowlands that lay in the shadow of the western wall.

* * *

The madness of the doting father brought them over the plains dotted with the low mud huts of those who inhabited them. Their shadows were long and needlelike, and long and needlelike the shadows walking about outside them, poking through the litter of the ground and the threads of the small gulches and arroyos webbing the plain. Most outcasts died, their huts mere grave markers for flaymen to check when nothing else would satisfy the Debt. The ones who survived guarded some secret that kept them stocked with nutrients and water. Styro and No Legs were the latter kind; No Legs a clairvoyant serving those in the basecamp who had no right to call on the shamans of their own clan for divination, and Styro an adept bloom picker.

The truth was that some time ago, soon after Solojazz’s womb had dried up, she had found Styro’s hut and watched that woman from waking to sleeping, spying on her from the gulches as she went up into the hills and mountains to pick blooms. She had learned some of the trade this way; the rest by accident and famine’s encouragement. _Compete_ dictated she had nothing to feel toward this woman for that, yet Solojazz knew her heart was not dispassionate in this affair.

The way to the hut was not difficult to remember, so she pointed at it when they came near, to guide her father. As the scooter agrav was coming to rest, Solojazz noticed the western horizon now hosted a dust storm billowing out from the dark toward them. Darkstorms, as these westerly winds were called, could be frigid; it would be best to find shelter in the basecamp before such weather hit.

“The storm, father,” she yelled over the hum of the old engine. He nodded as if it were a casual observation.

“Childbirth is of no time we may dictate,” he reminded her. “It is heedless.”

Not entirely, true, thought Solojazz. She felt the small bundle of cataplasms in the pitpocket of her cloak’s left arm buffeting against her body. She grit her teeth all the same.

No one came out to greet them as the scooter’s skids touched down. There was only the guttering light of a dung fire within the hut they approached, and the sound of a male voice chanting in the air. Solojazz knew that would be No Legs the shaman, trying to divine the future of his child through his star fugue. So much for his help in this.

There was something else in the air, too – a tension that set Solojazz on edge; boring into her temples, her molars. Could it be the static charge of the storm coming in the air? It was too far away.

“Father, feel that?” she asked him. It was plain he knew what she was talking about, but he only shrugged.

“It is the storm. Come, come inside quickly.”

It was not the storm, Solojazz knew this. There was something else here… but there was no time to consider it.

She ducked through the low open doorway and greeted Styro, laying naked on the floor, panting and straining. There was, as yet, no blood – there was nothing to indicate the water had broken. No Legs sat in the far corner of the room, on the other side of the alcove where the fire burned, his body smote with ash from head to stumps, breathing and chanting in time with his mate’s contractions.

“He divines only a son,” Styro announced without greeting. She mumbled it again, then again, and then again. She moved smooth white pebbles from hand to hand, as was her way.

“A Revelator may be a male,” her father said, but Styro shook her head sadly.

“He divines the star man will take _only_ the son.” The mumbling repeated it the four times. The pebbles passed from hand to hand.  
  
“He will pay us,” Solojazz said. “The Debt is great, even for the Company. If The Canned Woman knows of this her rage at the Debt unpaid will not stop at the basecamp walls.”

“HSSST, HSSST, HSSST, HSSST,” Styro hissed. “She listens.” Mumbling. Stones.  
  
Solojazz realized Styro meant the starman – a woman – must be somewhere nearby. Possibly even listening. Their technology was as good as shaman’s magic – better.

“No Legs speaks with the starman, but she promises nothing. Yet No Legs divines our son will be taken. This is all for him.”

Solojazz hauled her father over to Styro and brought them face to face, forcing the old man down on his knees, hobbled over the prostrate woman. It was her turn to hiss:

“The two of you bring me here to birth this child for you and think nothing of mine? I do no honor to my family in honoring a deception! Better I kill everyone in this room after I have the baby, and bring your bodies back to the Woman for repayment.”

No one said anything; Styro looked down at her belly, which writhed - the hand of an infant gliding across it from within, ghostly in the flamelight. She was crying. Solojazz’s father said nothing. She relented and allowed him to stand back up, searching his eyes angrily, reading every feature in his disgusting, unshorn face.

“Don’t look at me,” the old man said at length. “You spoke the only answer there is to give. You will take our bodies and buy yourself repayment of the Debt. That is why I came to you. Now help us in these last moments, before we devalue ourselves to you through her tears.”

Styro was indeed crying, her face also uncovered and weak.

“Stop,” Solojazz commanded.

Three bodies to flay, and the return of the scooter, for one dead outrider (also to be flensed for the Debt himself). The agrav would hold them, but Solojazz’s heart was not impartial. More than the fact she owed some of her _compete_ to Styro’s obsessive search for blooms; the audacity of the woman’s gambit for her unborn child thrilled Solojazz. Three or – quite possibly four – deaths so the starman would take the child off this planet – but used and worthless lives; already essentially suited for the Debt: an old woman, an old man, a crippled and disgraced shaman… and this pregnant outcast. A worthy trade.

No. No, she was not yet for the Debt. Solojazz had been taught this by her mothers: use every tool in the _compete_.

Styro was a tool.

Solojazz thrust her father aside and knelt beside the woman. Within moments, she had produced a medicine needle, and a vial of alcohol.

“Father, go outside and scrape up some of the white salts on the rocks; most likely you will find them near the gulley’s edge. I must attend to this woman.”  
  
The old man went. Solojazz checked the dilation and satisfied herself about the state of the child to be; it was indeed still early: perhaps a half a full sleep until then. But there was blood, and mucous: water had certainly broken. Solojazz grunted. Styro looked at her inquisitively.

“Your water has broken.”

“Y-yes,” Styro stammered through a contraction.

“Where is the mess?”

Still wincing, Styro pointed at No Legs. “He ate it, ate it, ate it, ate it.” Pebbles passed from hand to hand.

Solojazz nodded. Disgraced though he might be, and bereft of parts of his anatomy, No Legs had not lost his knowledge of the old ways. She gazed at the dirty Jazz plate without any eyeholes which covered his face completely, gray dreadlocks spilling out from all around it, his frame rising and falling with the chant. She hoped what she was about to do would not take him away from his divination; some said that the fugue path of the clairvoyant was made as much as found.

“If you are making us this path,” she whispered to him, “let nothing stop you.”  
  


* * *

At length the old man returned, the scrapings of his work gathered in his hands, the one cupped over the other to protect against a rising wind. He said the storm had almost arrived.

Solojazz tasted the crystalline powder he had gathered up – this was the epsoms she needed. Taking them, she poured a small amount into a vial of water, sealed it, and shook it, then set it beside the fire. It would be ready in a moment – there! She snatched it up and put it next to the alcohol to cool.

When this was done, she sent the needle into the woman’s wrist, deep into the blood’s path, mixed the alcohol and epsom water, and affixed her vial to the needle, letting this concoction mix into Styro’s blood. For awhile the only sounds were of the wind, and Styro’s breathing, and the chants of words No Legs knew but did not understand, the ashen man’s mantra against distraction.

When it had begun to grow dark outside as the dust began to cover the light of the stars and even the glint of the eastern sun beyond the distant walls of the basecamp, Solojazz cocked her head to one side and attended to the sounds in the hut again: Stryo’s breathing had subsided. She looked lazily from one part of the room to the other, sweat beading on her forehead. Solojazz felt her belly. Good; there was nothing.

Her father was senile; the younger woman drunk. No Leg’s eyes saw nothing near or recent. The eyes of the person in the doorway, however, were fixed on the needle.

Solojazz jumped – she had not seen how the woman appeared. Tall and thin, almost diaphanous pale skin moving beneath a translucent blue film (or perhaps, the Voltan began to surmise, it was _clothing_ , though it concealed nothing), the woman seemed lithe and fragile as a vase at once. Emerald eyes set in a face of pure alabaster ringed with jet-black whorls of curled hair. A red helmet, as translucent as the suit, sealed in the fearsome beauty of the creature like a clamshell food wrapper. Even the dust of the storm seemed repulsed from her every inviolate surface.

And in her right hand a sword was held, its blade over a meter long.

“Bow” it said, its voice masked by a strange vocoder, but Solojazz had no idea what that meant, nor did her father. They shrank from the starman. Styro moaned slightly.

“The baby remains within this woman,” Solojazz announced in the Voltan tongue she reserved for her matriarchs. “I have given her a medicine that stops the contractions, to delay –”

The sword arm slashed angrily, and No Legs’ head came nearly off his frame, which toppled to the floor. Styro screamed and went limp, panting, staring at the ceiling.

“I am a goddess to you, and all that means,” said the starman, advancing a step into the room. “You will now reverse the poison.”

“Perhaps you may, my lady. I have no means to. I have done this to force a better bargain for ourselves.”

Age and experience were impossible for Solojazz to see in the features of this plastic angel – whether she was dealing with something wise and adept, or young and reckless, it was impossible to know. The price of a Revelator to people who lived in space was rumored high; therefore she wagered they would send one with experience and composure who would appreciate honesty more than pointless deceit. She hoped No Legs’ unfortunate fate was only the demonstration of will; that was something she could respect and even understand.

“You delay the birth, but my client cannot wait, nor I sit about haggling” vocoded the starman. Her eyes narrowed into furious slits. “And you guess this.”

Solojazz nodded, her heart pounding. One more snap of that sword wrist… it would surely be coming for her…  
  
“I am a midwife, my lady. You may take me and the woman, and her child… and we will deliver to you a Revelator – “

“The rawest base material of a Revelator - the potential. Like a gamete foundering on the lip of a whore. That is all you have to give; all you cling to –” the woman interrupted her tirade to turn suddenly toward Solojazz’s father. The suit slid limpid over her body like amphibian skin.

“And what about him? Another midwife? I only need one.”

“He brought me here,” Solojazz said, pausing to glance into her father’s eyes, to try to see if he would make this difficult – but he was smiling – beaming, even. It should have revolted her, but it didn’t, somehow.

The sentiment was not shared by the starman. Her lip curled, she produced a medical aid kit from a pouch at her side and threw it at the old man’s feet.

“Take it and return to your camp. I trust you will be able to spend it wisely.”

It was true; with such a thing, he could easily repay the Debt, Solojazz knew. She could not help feeling some of his elation as she watched her father snatch up the gift and duck out through the door. As he mounted the agrav, he turned and looked back at his daughter, still grinning, knowing this would be the last they would ever see of each other – and then there was a low zipping sound, audible through the howl of the storm. The world around Solojazz was thumped, hard. Dirt and rocks flew everywhere; the woman from space was thrown against the corpse of No Legs. The fire went out. Styro was screaming, dirt in her eyes. The agrav was shattered; pieces of it rolling and burning, her father gone.

It couldn’t be Redcups… or even the Canned Woman. It had to be Company. Solojazz stumbled to her feet, pulled Styro up, and was thrown back down to the ground by another thump, this one taking the roof off their hut. In the next instant, something huge and white materialized out of nothing far above them, in the darkness of the storm – an immense machine.

“The Broodmare,” shouted the starman, her vocoder voice given way to the high voice of a woman Solojazz could recognize as mortal. Its legs supported a vast angular body, painted completely anti-flash white, which was descending toward them even while it emitted a nauseatingly deep warble, as if it were a predatory glitch in the fabric of reality incensed to violence on the denizens of this dimension.

Something highly energetic _bounced off the air_ in front of the monster, landing in a smoking crater meters away. Laser weapons that she had never seen radiated out to an unseen point in the dust cloud.

“Stand up! Stand up!” the woman from space was shouting. Solojazz stood, dragging Styro with her. A door was opening on the underside of the Broodmare, and fibrous ladders thrown down. The starman secured the two Voltans onto these, then herself, in moments, and one after the other, they were pulled within the belly of the vehicle above.  
  


Inside, nothing made sense. There were many lights, enormous sounds, and before the hatch beneath had even closed, the starman walked _into_ a wall of the tiny room where they huddled on the floor, disappearing in a watery shimmer. Solojazz touched the iridescent wall: it was like some kind of jelly – almost like thinkmeat… and it felt of _cold hatred_. There was a flash in her mind’s eye as though seeing _out_ \- through the machine, somehow - as its crew battled… what was that? Another metal monster – no, two! Lumbering toward them over the lowland plain, their tan hulls sloped and sleek. Then the lasers of the Broodmare cycled, their mechanisms an unbearably loud: _kch-chack kch-chack kch-chack_. One of the pursuing walkers melted in half, a bloom of fire escaping from between its separated parts and pushing them asunder.

The whole Broodmare shook as it descended into a gulch, and Solojazz’s hand was thrown from the wall, ending her vision. The metal golem warbled insanely again. The Voltan could not resist – thrusting her hand back into the gel, she could _see_ – dozens of white spheres were materializing out of the air in front of them, parting around the Broodmare’s gargantuan loping gait. The gel felt _giddy_ , and Solojazz thought she knew why.

Ahead of them, just around a bend in the gulch, the ground opened up into a lower valley where they could see a tug that hadn’t been there before, waiting to take them into orbit. It was unlike anything Solojazz had ever seen, striped in livery of bloody rust, asteroidal grey, and that same ablative white. She shouted with joy, her old body practically (and actually) vibrating, both from excitement and the reciprocation of the mech’s cyclopean engines. But this was not why the starmen’s mech was happy; if anything, something in her sensed that meant disappointment – even _boredom_ (what was boredom?). Only the sound of a chain of distant explosions seemed to perk up the glum beast.

“Aaaah!” Styro yelled. Solojazz turned to face her.

A baby lay limp between her legs on the deck, taking tentative, shallow breaths.

“Shit.”


End file.
